George was obsessed by the physical act of gardening, working with his land every day that he could. All through his life, as money and fame came to him, he found pleasure seeking houses with gardens.Įnglish country houses are known for their gardens, but many of their owners never got their hands dirty. Victory Gardens, they were called during and after the war, and my own father had one, too. For George Harrison, raised in the working class in postwar Liverpool, one of those beginnings must have been his father's vegetable garden. With his own prestige, and because they loved George, Scorsese has been able to call on those who knew Harrison in all weathers: his son Dhani, Ringo and Paul, Yoko Ono, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, Eric Clapton, Jackie Stewart and many others. With George's faithful second wife, Olivia, as his co-producer, he has assembled all the archival material, all the photos, all the film and video, transient and lasting. With “Material World,” which will debut over two nights on HBO, at 208 minutes, Scorsese has accomplished the best documentary that is probably possible. This is a long film, for which the expansiveness of cable television is appropriate. They resisted the possibility of being entirely consumed. They found escape and joy in music and film. They began as lonely, alienated children. It is clear, as Paul Theroux points out in a recent article, that in Harrison's life Scorsese saw much of his own reflected. In Martin Scorsese's documentary “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” Harrison's journey is traced as a search for himself in the tumult of incoming distractions.